This invention relates to communications capabilities available to businesses, specifically communications capabilities available to businesses during and immediately following disaster events. In the present context, a disaster is characterized by any event that renders one or more sites of a business incapable of receiving and responding to telephone calls from the external world. Disasters are also characterized by a business site's inability to place telephone calls to the outside world. During some disasters, it is possible that the site's communication infrastructure will be rendered inoperable viz. the Private Branch Exchange (PBX) suffers damage.
In other situations, the communications infrastructure may be inaccessible by business users (users) but left intact. In either case normal methods of communication by telephone are no longer available to the business.
By way of example during the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist tragedy, where the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed, corporate users, henceforth referred to as users, were dispersed throughout the City and its Boroughs. Some started to work out of their homes. Others set up operations in hotels or were transported to the appropriate hot site. Hot sites are locations where the business had contracted with a third party to provide disaster recovery services and systems access to data for users. It is likely that telephone service was provided at these hot sites.
However, the fabric that is known as the telephone directory for the businesses undergoing the disaster was destroyed. Thus, customers were not able to speak to points of contact (users) within the business by dialing their phone number on a business card as they usually did. Normal channels of voice communications such as cellular phones were also disrupted on a wide scale due to overloading of the cell grids. Hotel private branch exchanges (PBX) were likely overloaded by the sheer traffic being experienced far in excess of conditions that these systems were designed to handle. All of this adds up to a severe business interruption even though corporate data was well safeguarded and available in the vast majority of cases. Businesses subjected to such disasters have no effective way of dealing with day-to-day, routine voice communications. This capability is crucial to businesses where voice communications with customers is the primary method of conducting business (insurance companies, brokerage houses, etc) and making sales.
Hot sites can be equipped to handle telephone communications in addition to providing on-line access to customer data. To take advantage of this capability customers must provide their telephone company a switchover plan to be executed in the event of a disaster. The plan must be coordinated with the hot site vendor. The switchover can take from twenty-four to forty eight hours. Thus the customer is left with no telephone communications during and immediately after the disaster event. What's more, it is likely that the customers'PBX was loaded with numerous announcements and features, each employee having customized their extension. All of these will be lost during the disaster. Finally, since most medium to large customers have PBXs connected to the telephone company via T-1 with DIDs they rely on the PBX to provide the intelligence required to direct individual calls to particular extensions. It is likely that this capability will also be lost as a result of the disaster.